


The Revenant's Path

by ellida



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Gen, Post-Harrow the Ninth (Locked Tomb Trilogy), death-defying spirit gymnastics, ghosts doing ghost things, psychopomps gonna psychopomp, speculation about spirit magic, spontaneous group projects, theoretical pseudobabble
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-13 13:48:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,242
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29279451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ellida/pseuds/ellida
Summary: “You’d have to pick the revenant’s path and travel along a thanergetic link, and that’s just madness again: sitting inside—I don’t know—a teapot, clinging on without sense or understanding, going slowly insane.” –Harrow the Ninthby Tamsyn Muir (p. 461)***Dulcinea Septimus never does what she’s told. Abigail Pent never met a theory she didn’t want to test. Together, there’s nothing they can’t haunt… but only one thing they want to.
Relationships: Dulcinea Septimus & Abigail Pent, background Dulcinea Septimus/Palamedes Sextus, even more background Dulcinea Septimus/Camilla Hect
Comments: 12
Kudos: 24
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 6





	The Revenant's Path

**Author's Note:**

  * For [reconditarmonia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/reconditarmonia/gifts).



> Thank you, thank you, thank you to my beta, El, for your invaluable assistance. Your insights and suggestions were absolutely brilliant and made this story so much more nuanced and interesting. I literally can't thank you enough.
> 
> Thanks also to @embraidery for helping me figure out how to approach the story in the first place and getting me unstuck every time I got stuck writing the first draft, despite not having read the books yet.
> 
> And of course, thank you, @reconditarmonia, for such an intriguing prompt! I love Dulcinea and Abigail, and I hope you enjoy this version of their continued adventures.

_“You’d have to pick the revenant’s path and travel along a thanergetic link, and that’s just madness again: sitting inside—I don’t know—a teapot, clinging on without sense or understanding, going slowly insane.” – **Harrow the Ninth** by Tamsyn Muir (p. 461)_  


* * *

  
The first thing Dulcie Septimus saw when she exited the collapsing Canaan House bubble was Abigail Pent knee-deep in brackish red water, bending almost double to examine the water’s surface with a fascinated look on her face, as her cavalier half-swam, half-prowled a wide and aimless circle around her.  
  
“Dulcie!” Magnus appeared relieved to have an excuse to abandon his half-hearted perimeter. “Glad to see you made it out!”  
  
Abigail straightened immediately. “You might have given us a bit of warning. Magnus was positively frightened when you didn’t come through with us.”  
  
“I was, you know,” confirmed her cavalier.  
  
“I would say I’m sorry,” Dulcie said thoughtfully, “but I’m actually not a bit. I had something to do—well, actually, several somethings, and I did them. I take it we’re not back in the River?”  
  
A delicious gleam in Abigail’s eye promised that she wasn’t going to let Dulcie’s vagueness pass unchallenged, but for the moment, she confined herself to saying, “Yes and no. I’m confident that the water belongs to the River, but this is nothing like the River as we experienced it before. Much too placid.”  
  
“Speak for yourself,” muttered Magnus. “Some of us much prefer this River experience.”  
  
“My guess,” Abigail continued, ignoring the interruption, “is that we’re in another bubble. What I haven’t quite worked out yet is _how_. Or, more to the point, _why_. Though I do have my suspicions.” She quirked an eyebrow at Dulcie, the gesture somewhere between “inviting” and “imperative.”  
  
“Guilty!” Dulcie admitted. “I wasn’t quite sure it would work. While you were sorting out Harrow, I took advantage of her bubble’s rules to will another connected bubble into existence and to set its parameters to call the three of us. I don’t think it will last as long without the presence of a living necromantic anchor to tether it, but I don’t think I need eight months.”  
  
“The absence of the Sleeper certainly makes it more stable,” Abigail observed. “Well, that takes care of _how_.”  
  
“Does it?” Magnus asked dubiously, but subsided at a glance from his necromancer.  
  
“All that remains is _why_.” Abigail’s eyebrows slid several degrees further into “imperative.”  
  
Dulcie shrugged apologetically. “I thought that would be obvious! Lady Pent—Abigail—I find myself in need of a psychopomp. Would you oblige?”  
  
Abigail’s face brightened. “I thought you’d never ask! Though I do have some definitional concerns about this bubble’s structural integrity—Magnus, be a dear and keep an eye on it, would you? Let me know right away if anything changes.”  
  
“Right you are.” Magnus squeezed her shoulder fondly and resumed his lazy perimeter. Apparently, it was less aimless than it had originally seemed. Dulcinea revised her estimation of the Fifth cavalier in his favor.  
  
“Ordinarily, I’d let a client come to it in their own time,” Abigail said, conveniently ignoring the fact that she had done no such thing with Harrowhark. “But since this bubble’s stability is in question, I’ll come right out with it. Does this have to do with Cytherea? Or with Palamedes Sextus?”  
  
“Palamedes,” Dulcie returned. “Well, Palamedes and Camilla, really. Not that seeking out Cytherea doesn’t have its own appeal, and I may do that eventually! But you’ll be wanting to get back to Jeannemary and Isaac, and anyway… I have a different score I’d like to settle first. With life.”  
  
“Fascinating!” Abigail leaned forward. “What did you have in mind?”  
  
Dulcie answered with a question of her own. “Where do you understand Palamedes Sextus to be?”  
  
“Based on Harrowhark’s description, I suspect that he prepared for his death by creating a bubble of his own, though I’m not entirely sure what he would have used for an anchor.”  
  
“I am,” Dulcie said. “He used his own body. Cellularly. He explained a bit of the theory in his final letter to me. He suggested that I might want to do the same, but I’d had enough of being a prisoner of my own cells, thank you very much.”  
  
“Ahhh,” Abigail sighed delightedly. “I was so hoping it was that! It confirms one of my pet theories—oh, I can’t _wait_ until my brother raises me, I’ve got so many new avenues for him to pursue!” The spirit magician sank into a distracted reverie, which Dulcie was loath to interrupt.  
  
And she didn’t have to, because a bare moment later, Abigail was saying, “But Dulcie, as big a blow to my ego as this is, I’m not sure there’s much I can do for you. Based on the strength of Palamedes’s attachment to you, I could probably summon his spirit here, but that’s a dead end. I wouldn’t be able to put him back, and that seems rather against his wishes after all the trouble he took not to end up in the River in the first place.”  
  
“Oh, no, of course not! That’s not what I want at all,” Dulcie reassured the Fifth necromancer. “I want you to send _me_ to _him_. Or them, really, since where Pal is, Camilla can’t be far behind—but since he’s the one in the bubble, he’s the only relevant one for our purposes.”  
  
“Dulcie,” Abigail said gently, “you heard my explanation of inter-River travel to poor Harrowhark. While you very cleverly engineered this bubble to permit entrance from our previous bubble, there exists no link between this bubble and Palamedes Sextus’s probable bubble. Intentional travel between unknown points within the River is impossible. I _am_ sorry.”  
  
“I was thinking more of taking the—what did you call it?—the revenant’s path,” said Dulcie.  
  
“We’ve been through this,” Abigail replied, with admirable patience. “Revenants require a thanergetic link. You died in your shuttle, which is currently sunk beneath the waves outside Canaan House. Unless you want to become the ghost of a shipwreck, which I do not recommend, your thanergetic links are useless.”  
  
“Not quite,” Dulcie said apologetically. “Or at least, I’m hoping not. You see, I still have this.” And from her pocket, she withdrew her discarded nasal cannula.  
  
“May I?” At Dulcie’s nod, the other necromancer plucked the cannula from her fingers and rolled it between her own.  
  
“Let’s see. Independently living tissue with _two_ thalergetic signatures? Yours and—?“ Abigail broke off quizzically.  
  
“Palamedes’s,” Dulcie supplied.  
  
“Extraordinary craftsmanship. But I thought you had never met the Warden of the Sixth in person.”  
  
“Not in person, no,” said Dulcie. “But when we were young, Palamedes was hopelessly romantic, and I was hopelessly Seventh.”  
  
Abigail raised a single eyebrow.  
  
“He signed one of his letters in blood, you see. I’m afraid I immediately decanted it into a vial for safekeeping,” Dulcie elaborated. “What did you expect me to do, pass up freely given thalergetic material?”  
  
“Well, when you put it like that,“ said Abigail, ruefully.  
  
“It was pure luck that I decided to weave it into my cannula. Well, pure luck or a certain morbid tendency towards over-preparation, depending on who you ask,” Dulcie continued brightly. “But the point is that I’m a competent enough flesh magician that under normal circumstances, I could easily have used the cannula to extrapolate to any other remaining traces of thalergetic energy.”

“And thus locate Palamedes’s physical anchor,” said Abigail. “Given that Harrowhark’s bubble—and this one, as far as I was able to ascertain before you arrived—still obeyed the basic laws of necromancy, the cannula’s thalergetic signature should still be active. But it won’t be any use from this side of the River.”  
  
Dulcie leaned forward eagerly. “That’s why I thought of the revenant’s path. Since the cannula wasn’t entirely my tissue, I should still have a thanergetic link to it, right?”

“Well, yes, though, based on Marta’s report, it’s most likely ash by now. Not that that would stop you from using it, mind, but much as I do not recommend haunting a shipwreck, I must say it would likely be preferable to haunting an ash heap.”

“Right,” said Dulcie. “That’s why I need a spirit magician. Isn’t there a way you could keep me from going full revenant?”

“Full revenant?” Abigail’s smile was amused, but her gaze was thoughtful.

“I just thought that if I could somehow ride the link back without getting stuck inside it, I could triangulate from there, and find Pal that way.”

“If I were on the other side, it would be a simple raising, but from here…”Abigail’s voice trailed off as her expression grew progressively more abstracted, then suddenly cleared. “Unless… how’s your spirit magic?”

“Not great, but not totally nonexistent,” said Dulcie. “Odds and ends that I picked up from Palamedes over the years. The Seventh doesn’t go much in for it, as a rule. Too busy mining our decaying flesh for thanergy, you know.”

“Are you familiar with Panca’s Theorem?”  
  
“Oh, the one about dual-direction spirit links? Pal and I experimented with it a few years ago, but neither of us was a good enough liminal magician to get it to work at a distance. Mark me down as ‘solid on the theory, but untested in practice.’”

“In that case, I think we can turn me into your spirit anchor. I’d open a Panca link with you here, and that connection on this side of the River should allow you to ride the trajectory of the thanergetic link back to the cremains without becoming bound to them. Then you could perform your thalergetic signature search, though I'm not sure what good it would do you beyond confirming possible locations for his physical anchor.”

“Couldn’t I enter his bubble from the physical side?”

“No,” said Abigail. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. As a revenant spirit, you may re-enter the physical world, but your return to the River is bound to your point of entry. All roads lead right back here.”

“Well, then,” Dulcie said, with a growing sense of excitement. “There’s nothing for it but to test the Hexagorian Hypothesis.”

Abigail blanched. “Dulcie, the Hexagorian Hypothesis is completely untested and has been for eight hundred years, for the very good reason that putting it into practice is suicidally dangerous. ”

“Not for us,” Dulcie argued. “We’re already dead.”

“Don’t be flip,” said Abigail. “You know perfectly well the dangers that can befall a spirit—or at least, you should, after our experience with the Sleeper.”

“Flippant is my middle name,” Dulcie shot back unrepentantly. “We have an opportunity here! The usual obstacles to testing Hexagorian don’t apply: we’re both already dead, we’ve got the right aptitudes, and we’ve got stable starting and ending points. That’s more than anyone else has ever managed.” 

“It may be more than anyone else has managed, but that doesn’t mean it’s sufficient,” said Abigail regretfully. “Some risks are too great.” 

“Surely not! You’re the spirit caller who raised a ghost through sheer passion,” Dulcie insisted. “And c’mon, you can’t tell me you weren’t impressed by my cannula. We can do this. We might be the only two people who can.”

“I don’t doubt your skill,” said Abigail. “Successfully swapping places long enough for me to examine any thalergetic remnants for traces of spirit magic and then follow that trajectory back to a probable River location will be tricky, but we might just manage it. That’s not what concerns me.”  
  
“Well?” Dulcie waggled her eyebrows in her best imitation of Abigail’s imperative look.

The look Abigail gave her was wry, fond, and above all, exasperated. “What concerns me is what comes afterward.”

Dulcie laughed. “After? Why, you send me on my merry way! I would have thought that’d be the easy part.”

“Dulcie,” Abigail said. “In addition to the very great dangers of attempting an untried method of navigation through the River—of which annihilation is the least—have you considered what will happen if we actually succeed?”

“I’ll be reunited with Palamedes,” said Dulcie. “And Camilla, presumably.”

“Reunited, yes, but under what circumstances?” Abigail’s face seemed to grow even more earnest. “Trapping yourself inside your beloved’s cells might pass for romance on the Seventh, but I can’t see how it’s much improvement over being a prisoner of your own.”

“Well, we don’t know what arrangements Palamedes has made. His cells might be quite comfortable,” Dulcie pointed out. At Abigail’s look, she relented. “Of course I’m not planning to stay forever. That’s taking ‘one flesh’ a bit too literally, even for my taste. It just seems awfully hard to cross without ever having met them face to face.”

“Oh,” said Abigail in a very small voice.

“Cam and Pal were the best parts of my nasty, brutish, short life,” Dulcie went on. “We were sundered too soon. And maybe it’s too late, maybe we can’t be knit back together, maybe Palamedes has no plan besides a slow descent into madness inside his own bones, but I have to try. I have to know. Wouldn’t you?”

“Yes,” the other necromancer said in a slow, choked voice. “Yes, I think I would.”

Dulcie beamed. “Then, it’s settled?”

“Yes,” Abigail repeated. “Dulcinea Septimus, it would be my honor to test the Hexagorian Hypothesis with you. Though, mind you, the swap will be fiddly and doesn’t have much of a margin for error, so this may all be moot. But I’ll do my best to mark some signposts for you.”  
  
“Got it.” Dulcie bit her lip. “Do you need to make any preparations before we start, or—?” She gestured helplessly at Magnus.  
  
Abigail tracked the motion back to her still-circling cavalier, who gave a cheery wave without breaking stride.  
  
“No,” she said. “I had a pretty good guess of what this bubble meant before you turned up, you know. We’re both prepared. And you had the foresight to select a task that requires nothing beyond a flesh magician and a spirit magician working in concert.”  
  
“I always did like the idea of a double act,” Dulcie agreed.  
  
Abigail folded her hand over Dulcie’s and squeezed it once. “There, that’s the Panca link set. When you’re ready, start down the revenant’s path. Gently, if you can. But don’t worry. I’ve got you.”  
  
Dulcie closed her eyes, grasped the cannula tightly in the hand not holding Abigail’s, and threw her mind back towards her sense of the cannula. She felt herself begin to streak forward like an arrow in flight, but that sensation was immediately countered by the heavy weight of Abigail’s spirit hand in hers. Oh, that felt _odd_. As if the arrow’s fletching had decided to stay put on the bowstring as the rest of it raced towards its target.  
  
The forward arrow of her spirit body landed in the cremains with an admittedly noncorporeal but still unsettling _thump_. Dulcie rocketed back and forth between bubble and morgue shelf, like a wildly oscillating compass needle, before she managed to find a tenuous equilibrium in between. It took a few tries to balance her sensory inputs to track both the spirit cannula and its physical remains simultaneously, but with Abigail holding her securely, she eventually managed it.  
  
“Okay, I think I’ve got the signature,” she sent back to Abigail. “Give me a little more slack and a push so I can scan for similar signatures?”  
  
The other necromancer’s hold loosened slightly, and an electric jolt dislodged Dulcie from the cremains. She unspooled herself slowly, gradually diffusing and widening her awareness. Some smears on an upper floor of Canaan House pinged her radar, but Dulcie resolutely ignored them. Camilla Hect was no slouch. She wouldn’t have spent eight months hanging around Canaan House waiting for rescue.  
  
Dulcie gradually spiraled her awareness out of the First House, widening and widening to take in the surrounding Houses. A delicate _ping_ from the Second caught her attention, and she hesitated. “I can feel something down there, but I can’t see Cam ever going to the Second willingly, never mind staying there for eight months. Do you think it’s worth investigating anyway?”  
  
“The swap is fiddly enough that I’d rather avoid repeating it if at all possible. Can you throw up a flag here and expand your search radius? We can always come back if necessary.”  
  
Dulcie drew a careful glyph for attention in the general vicinity of the Second, then continued expanding her awareness, looping gradually out through Empire space and then beyond. Constellations and galaxies spread out at her fingertips. Ahhh, _this_ was more like what she’d imagined getting off Rhodes would be like.  
  
“Careful,” Abigail’s voice whispered in her ear. “You’re wobbling a bit. Stay focused.”  
  
“Sorry,” Dulcie apologized. She bid the galaxies a wistful farewell and resumed her search.  
  
After a few more rotations around her widening gyre, an unfamiliar planet pinged Dulcie’s thalergetic senses. Her breath quickened.  
  
“Abigail, I’ve got something.”  
  
“Go ahead and dive for it,” said Abigail briskly. “I’ve got you.”  
  
Dulcie honed in on the faint spark of thalergetic decay and let it drag her slowly down, and down, and down into the orbit of a lush planet, down into the thick fug of pollution and late afternoon haze choking a bustling city. For a moment, the heat and crush and sheer olfactory overload threatened to overwhelm her, but she quested enough awareness backwards to clutch the cannula tighter and succeeded in locking onto the matching signature. _There_. A skeletal hand that was—joy of joys!—currently moving on its own, but definitely not being puppeted _._ Dulcie whooped. “He’s here! We did it!”  
  
“Oh, very good!” The Fifth House was apparently much more restrained in its manner of rejoicing. “Now comes the tricky bit. You’ll need to rebalance. Leave as little of your awareness there as you can manage, and head back towards me. Go slowly—I’ve marked the pathway for you as best I can. I’ll counter as you go.”  
  
Slowly, slowly, Dulcie began to crab her way back along the spirit link.  
  
It was fiendishly difficult. Much more so than Dulcie’s failed experiments with Palamedes had prepared her for. It was—it was—it was like nothing Dulcie had ever experienced. It was like walking along a high-wire with her mind, while also playing one of those hiding-and-squshing-into-a-crevice-together games that Pro and Mia’s little ones were so enamored of, solving a horribly abstract mathematical equation, and drawing a complicated sketch, all while a bassoon concerto blatted away at top volume.  
  
And that was _before_ Abigail began creeping forward along the link. Dulcie lurched wildly, wobbling off the wire, as the children’s game and the mathematics and the pencil and the concerto threatened to crash in on each other in a wreck of distinctly un-joyful noise. Oh, _fuck_.  
  
“Dulcie,” Abigail Pent’s calm voice cut through the chaos. “Dulcie,the sigil. _Now_.”  
  
And now that Abigail mentioned it, Dulcie could see one of the spirit-talker’s sigils hovering just out of her peripheral vision. With a heave and a crash, she flung as much of herself as she could at it and discovered that it made a foothold of sorts. A place she could string her high wire, as it were.  
  
“Good,” Abigail said and gave a nod of approval that Dulcie felt rather than saw. “Get situated and let me know when you’re ready to move to the next one.”  
  
The _next_ one? Well, even if Dulcie vaporized this instant, she could certainly say she’d had an adventure. She gathered her courage—and the threads of her conflicting necromantic processes—and pressed onward. Another sigil. A ferocious wobble, and another sigil. A shouted warning from Abigail, a hasty brute-force explosion of thanergy into another sigil, and there Dulcie was, back in the bubble, clutching the other necromancer’s hand.  
  
Well, she was mostly back in the bubble. A tiny, queasy part of her awareness flicked against Abigail’s solid spirit presence and some now-still metacarpals and what-all. (Bones had never been Dulcie’s strong suit.)  
  
Serving as anchor, it turned out, required even more energy than tracing remnant thalergy. Dulcie was newly astounded at Abigail Pent’s sheer nerve in entrusting her astral safety to such a neophyte spirit magician. Even though Abigail had set up the link, Dulcie was now in control of it, responsible for providing enough ballast to the other necromancer to keep both of them from snapping back into the River proper or whirling away into oblivion. Abigail had made it seem effortless, but Abigail was an unparalleled spirit magician, one whom Dulcie had seen perform impossible feats before breakfast. Meanwhile, Dulcie was a flesh magician armed with nothing but insatiable curiosity and a few cool spirit tricks. 

_Well, shit_ , she thought. _I'm the anchor. Guess I better think heavy thoughts._

Silly as it felt, it was the only idea she had. Dulcie concentrated her will on compacting her body, sinking down into the heaviest pose she could manage while keeping ahold of Abigail’s inert hand. 

“Are you really comfortable like that?” Abigail asked, in tones of genuine interest. Dulcie blew out her breath in a petulant huff and rearranged herself until the pose felt more sustainable.

“Better?” she asked.

She felt Abigail’s smile through the link. “Spirit-anchor’s choice, my dear. But since you ask, yes, that’s much more what I’d do. Ready?”

“I think so,” Dulcie called back.

“Try for a bit of confidence,” Abigail advised. “No one likes a wilting spirit anchor.”

Dulcie rolled her eyes. “I’m so ready my grandchildren just got into position.”

“Excellent,” Abigail replied, without a hint of irony. And then, oh God, she _moved_.

If switching places with Abigail had been fiendishly difficult, anchoring Abigail as she moved was utterly overwhelming and almost intolerable. It again put Dulcie in mind of impossible tasks. Trying to catch an entire swarm of stinging insects with her hands while balancing at the edge of a cliff in the middle of a gale, for instance. Or holding back a tsunami by standing in the surf and hugging it with her arms while trying not to dislodge a litter of kittens clinging to her shoulders. Maybe riding out a seismic quake en pointe, like an ancient dancer frozen in time, while mountains toppled around her. Something like that.

Abigail was being careful and gentle, moving as little as possible as she searched out the spirit traces, Dulcie could tell. Every move the master spirit-caller made was both clearly telegraphed and impossibly minute, precision made motion. The lines of her face were pulled taut with strain. She was coddling Dulcie to the best of her considerable necromantic abilities. Under ordinary circumstances, it would have pissed Dulcie right off. But since counterbalancing even those tiny movements made her feel seconds away from ripping apart, all she could manage was grudging gratitude, with generous side helpings of necromantic admiration and familiar self-disgust.

And it just went on, and on, and on. Dulcie thought of her own wild gamboling through the universe and shuddered. Ortus had been right. Abigail Pent was a wonder.

Then it happened. Abigail adjusted position slightly, in a movement so carefully choreographed in advance that Dulcie might as well have received an engraved invitation to witness it. But for all that, she still countered too slowly, and her connection with Abigail shivered and juddered wildly. Her awareness was shooting backwards and forwards like a compass needle again, and oh, this wasn’t good. Compass needles made rotten anchors. In another moment, their link would buckle and pitch them somewhere unpleasant and probably permanently deadly. Dulcie didn’t mind for herself so much (after all, what was more beautiful than expiring in the struggle for something just beyond your reach?), but Abigail… Abigail had plans. Abigail was going to cross the River with Magnus and find Isaac and Jeannemary. Except that now she wasn’t, because Dulcie was about to destroy her with botched spirit magic.

“Dulcie,” came Abigail’s voice, calm and collected and perfectly calibrated to pitch right through Dulcie’s panic. “We need to rebalance the link, much like when we did the crossing. When I tell you, you’ll need to take three small steps to your left and shift your weight back towards your heels. Whatever you do, don’t let go of my hand. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Dulcie said. “I understand. I need to get a grip, for God’s sake, right?”

Abigail only smiled, and Dulcie remembered that the spirit magician had made a career of teaching undergraduates. “Ready… steady… go!”

Dulcie took her assigned steps and canted her hips backwards, and the link snapped back into place. Well, mostly. Dulcie was once again solidly in the bubble, with only a hint of her awareness beside Abigail, but the weight of the link had lessened, some of it being borne by Abigail, who wouldn’t be able to move until Dulcie resumed it.

“Right, then,” Abigail said bracingly. “Hexagorian was an absolute fiend, but you’ve got this, Dulcie. I have every confidence.”

Abigail Pent’s confidence was a fearful thing. Dulcie gritted her teeth, leaned backwards further, and tugged. The link flowed easily towards her, its weight pressing down on her like a deflated parachute. Still grinding her teeth, Dulcie wrestled it back under control. She took a breath and then another. The link held steady.

“Perfect! Almost there,” Abigail said calmly, as if she hadn’t nearly been pulverized into spirit dust by Dulcie’s colossal ineptitude. If they got through this, Dulcie was going to go down on her knees in gratitude. She honestly was.  
  
After what seemed another age but probably wasn’t, Abigail announced, “I’ve got it. _There_.”

“Now what?” Dulcie gasped back.

“Lean hard on the bubble—even harder than you have been, as hard as you can—and let the rest go—I should be able to bring you back with me.” Abigail’s voice was steady as ever. “On my count. One… two… three… and _now!”_  
  
Obedient again, as she had rarely been in life, Dulcie let go of the bones and slammed her spirit body into Abigail’s in an ungainly tackle that sent them both sprawling into the brackish red water. An instant later, something cratered into her, slamming her head beneath the surface, and oh, _there_ she was, all of her, back in her bubble.  
  
A hand bobbed into her vision. Dulcie grabbed for it gratefully and let Abigail haul her back to her feet.  
  
“Well! That’ll certainly wake you up in the morning.” Abigail laughed. Her cheeks were flushed, and her eyes sparkled with mirth.

“And here I was about to apologize for almost dropping you into oblivion,” Dulcie said lightly. “I really am sorry,” she added contritely.

“Oh, that?” Abigail waved a hand. “That was the least of what I expected to happen. You did quite well, you know. For a flesh magician. I’m just grateful there was no comparable test of _my_ flesh magic.” Her eyes twinkled.

“Well, when you put it like that,” Dulcie said, feeling as if a weight had just been lifted off her chest. She inhaled deeply in sudden, dizzy joy. They had done it. They'd really done it.

“And we’ve definitively proven that while Hexagorian was correct in the main, he was also a harebrained, sloppy thinker. Oh, the words I’m going to have with him on the other side!” Abigail shook her fist playfully. 

Her joy was infectious. Dulcie grinned back in spite of herself. “That was much more thrilling than I thought it would be. Like being the heroine of an especially improbable romance novel!”  
  
“Who would that make me, I wonder?” Abigail said.  
  
“The wise older sister, of course! The one who gives excellent advice and has a thrilling career and is accomplished beyond belief in just about everything and always turns up at just the right moment to save the day,” Dulcie explained.  
  
“I should tell you that you give me far too much credit, but I’m afraid I can never turn down a compliment,” said the exceedingly accomplished spirit magician.  
  
“And now all that remains is for the sisters to bid a fond farewell, and the heroine to set off to reunite with her beloveds.” Dulcie sighed. “This has been fun, except maybe for the almost killing you part, but I really shouldn’t keep you any longer. Assuming you have the direction?”  
  
“I do. It’ll be the work of a moment to send you on your way, but…” Abigail hesitated. “Dulcie, are you sure about this? I feel duty-bound to repeat my speech about how putting very untested theorems into practice outside of laboratory conditions could ultimately lead to your disintegration. Or worse. And to remind you that while having already defied the odds once today with the first half of Hexagorian does not make the failure of the second half statistically more likely, it does begin to feel suspiciously like tempting fate.”  
  
“As I keep telling everyone, nonexistence is gorgeous! You can skip the speech,” Dulcie said. “I’ve made up my mind. I won’t fail here, at the last.”

“Of course not.” Abigail seemed resigned rather than surprised.  
  
Dulcie offered an apologetic smile. “I hereby absolve you of all sisterly duties! Give my apologies to Magnus too—oh, and say hi to the kids for me when you see them, if you think they’d like that.”  
  
“Of course,” said Abigail firmly. “Do let me know how it all works out, if you can. Ready?”  
  
Dulcie nodded. “I know I ambushed you a bit—”  
  
Abigail snorted. “Oh, bless you, as if you could keep me anywhere I didn’t want to stay! I never could pass up one last chance to play the medium or answer an unanswered question, and here you offered me both in one fell swoop! It’s been a genuine pleasure, Dulcie. I hope you find what you’re looking for.”  
  
And with that, Abigail Pent took hold of Dulcie’s shoulders, turned her around 130 degrees, and gave her a slight push. At once, Dulcie felt an answering tug across the ether, as if she were a fish at the end of a very long line. She snuck a glance behind her and caught a glimpse of gleaming lenses and a self-satisfied smile.  
  
“Thank you, Abigail,” she whispered and let go, giving herself over to being reeled in by the ether, flying along the trajectory between the bubble and her new tether, corporeality streaming away like vapor boiling off the hull of the shuttle that had taken her away from Rhodes.

* * *

  


Dulcie wasn’t sure how long she had been in transit—an age and a few seconds felt equally likely—before she landed in a tiny room. A glance revealed the room to be more of a monastic cell, really, though one belonging to a decidedly ill monastic whose bedside table was covered in medical paraphernalia, whose narrow bed showed a penchant for decadent pillows, and whose lowbrow taste in reading material precisely matched Dulcie’s own. A cell, moreover, that was already occupied, though not by the purported unlikely monk. The occupant was a tall, spare young man wearing grey necromantic robes and busily scribbling on one of the walls with a stubby pencil.  
  
Dulcie coughed slightly, more to announce her presence than out of any real need, and the young man startled around to face her, revealing astonishingly lambent grey eyes in a shocked and wondering face. Dulcie grinned.  
  
“Hey, Pal,” she said. “Room for one more?”


End file.
